and self —as stated by verses of the Qur’an— which are gifts and in trust to me, so that they will not be lost and go for nothing. He has repeatedly and categorically promised that He will preserve them in order to return them, and that as the price He will give eternal happiness and Paradise. This I understood with ‘the knowledge of certainty’ and believed with utter conviction.
Thus, I was taught by the verse For us God suffices that my Sustainer, the Glorious and Munificent One, ‘opens up’ through His Name of Opener the forms of the hundreds of thousands of varieties of animals and plants from limited, similar droplets and seeds, with the uttermost ease, speed, and perfection, and as we mentioned before, gives man this astonishing importance, making him the chief pivot of the works of His dominicality; so too He will create the resurrection of the dead and Paradise and will bestow eternal happiness as easily and definitely as He will create next spring. Had it had been possible, I would have declared through the tongues of all creatures, but since it was not possible, I declared by intention and through thought and imagination: For us God suffices, and He is the Best Disposer of Affairs! And so I want to repeat it through all eternity.
The Fourth Degree of the Luminous Verse ‘For us God suffices’
One time, when a period of heedlessness coincided with my being shaken by various indispositions like old age, exile, illness, and defeat, I was overcome by a grievous anxiety that my very existence, to which I was intensely attached and by which I was captivated, would cease to be, as would the existences of all creatures. Again I had recourse to the verse For us God suffices. It told me: “Study my meaning and look through the telescope of belief!”
I looked and I saw through the eyes of belief that my miniscule being was the mirror to an infinite existence, and through an infinite expansion was the means of gaining innumerable existences; it was a word of wisdom yielding the fruits of numerous everlasting existences far surpassing itself in value. I understood with ‘the knowledge of certainty’ that due to its relation with that infinite existence, to live for an instant was as valuable as existing eternally. For by understanding through the insight of belief that my being is the work, artefact and manifestation of the Necessarily Existent, I was saved from the endless darkness of desolate fears and the pains of innumerable separations. I knew that within a temporary separation was a permanent union with the beings I loved, with which, through bonds of brotherhood to the number of Divine Names manifested in the acts related to living creatures in particular, I had gained a relation.